An application in SearchAssist is a set of configurations and data from various sources. Search users can interact with the application once it is deployed on any of the channels. SearchAssist supports only web SDK channels.

You can have different applications for different environments, business purposes, regions, etc. When your application runs in different environments, you want to use different sets of data. For example, when you run your application on a staging website, you tend to use test data instead of production data. Similarly, the same applies to search. When you work on a staging version of your website, you tend to avoid hitting your production index for privacy reasons and to avoid skewing your analytics.

There are two ways you can split your search implementation for each environment:

1. Separate your environments into different indices on the same application.
2. Create several applications, and use one for an environment.

You can set the best approach depending on the isolation level you need between your environments.